Posts Tagged ‘Plug In Digital’

I’m not massively into war, if I’m honest. War’s quite bad, isn’t it? Still, shooting men’s faces off in video games is pretty fun. However, if you’re stirring up a fictional war for a video game, I’d be far more interested in unknowable celestial entities weaponising the very cosmos, devouring and merging stars to create colossal murdertools. If we’re going to die, let us be wiped out by something so vast it doesn’t even know we exist. Aye, that’s a nice premise all right, and the one behind Devouring Stars [official site].

After a stretch on Steam Early Access, developers Nerial today properly launched the celestial RTS. It’s on Steam for Windows, Mac, and Linux at £6 right now.

Name-checking ye olde retroe classices like Battlezone, Berzerk and Robotron, Vektor Wars [official site] launched last night. It’s an FPS where you blow up robots. Lots of robots. Loads of robots. You blow them up real hard. Aside from the robots you’re there to rescue, of course. But by and large, you’re exploding robots. It’s an arcadey affair, then, with nae cover systems or long cutscenes or… you shoot robots, I’m trying to say.

It’s now out on Steam with a 25% launch discount making it £3.74. No demo, sadly.

The blurring between video and video game is a weird history of technology. The storage space of CD-ROMs enabled FMV cutscenes and interactive movies. 3D graphics pushed out FMV as the new novelty. Motion capture let real actors mime basic actions for 3D models. Faster 3D hardware led to more-detailed character models able to perform more and more-intricate actions. Now we have dead-eyed glossy mannequins who are kissing why are they kissing this is so weird.

Stay Dead [official site] seems like it’s from another time, with footage of real actors fighting strung together into something between a turn-based fighting game and an interactive movie. It first came out in 2012, but a surprise Steam release yesterday reminded me of all this again.

Even as a (virtual) war-hardened, (often wrist-cramp-related) hardship-enduring Journalist, I sometimes can’t resist yodeling “Oooooo, pretty!” when I lay eyes upon particularly lush games. So it was with Finding Teddy. The invitingly colorful point-and-click adventure lured me in with adorable characters, an appealingly angular bent to its aesthetic, and a world that just screamed whimsy. Then a giant, very clearly unshaven spider leg reached out of our young heroine’s closet and plucked her teddy bear into some nightmare land of unspeakable terrors. “NOPE,” I bellowed. “NOPE, NOPE, NOPE.” But despite the protests of a violently arachnophobic, er, myself, I continued watching.